I just read that professor James Q. Wilson has died. Wilson studied a wide range of issues, but I was most familiar with his work Bureaucracy, which I reviewed for The Freeman back in 1991. One of the books central insights was that, unlike private enterprise, a government bureaucracy is not driven by incentives, but by constraints. He was also one of the first (if not the first) proponents of the theory that crime was dropping because more criminals were being put into prison, as well as one of the first proponents of the “broken windows” theory of policing, which would later underlie much of the remarkable reduction in New York City’s crime rate achieved by the Giuliani Administration.
He was an important writer and thinker, and he will be missed.
Tags: broken window policing, bureaucrats, Crime, James Q. Wilson, Obituary, The Freeman